The Death of Mrs. Westaway(81)

“What? When?”

“After she had you. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what happened, but I know she came back, for Bill Thomas ran a taxi from Penzance in those days—he’s long dead now—and he took her up to the house, and told me afterwards. He said he dropped her off and asked if he should wait, but she said no, she would call when she wanted to be collected. He said she had a look on her face like a maid going into battle. ‘A Joan of Arc look’ was what he called it.”

“But why?” Hal found herself frowning, shaking her head. “Why would she go back, when she tried so hard to get away?”

“I don’t know, my darling. All I know is, that really was the last I heard of her. Of either of them. Neither of them ever returned again, after that, and I never heard a word from them again. I often thought about them—and about that baby, you, I suppose it would have been! I often wondered how they were doing. You say your ma became a fortune-teller?”

“Tarot,” Hal said. She felt a little numb, battered by all the information that Lizzie had imparted. “She had a booth on the West Pier in Brighton.”

“That’s no surprise,” Lizzie said. Her broad face broke into a smile. “Oh, but she loved her tarot cards, treated them like fine china, she did. And many’s the time she read for me. Three children, she said I’d have, and three children I did. And what about Maud? I always thought she’d go on to become some university professor at a women’s college. History, it was, she wanted to study, I remember. She said to me, ‘There’s nothing you can’t learn from history to tell you how to deal with the present, Lizzie. That’s why I like it. However evil men are now, there’s always been worse.’ So that’s what I’m guessing.” She took another sip of her tea, her blue eyes twinkling at Hal over the cup. “Professor of history at the University of London, that’s my betting. Am I right?”

“I don’t know,” Hal said. Her throat had closed, and her voice, when she managed to speak, was stiff and croaky. “I never met Maud, at least not that I can remember. My mother never even mentioned her name.”

“So she just . . . disappeared?” Lizzie said. She raised her eyebrows, faint blond shadows almost disappearing into her yellow fringe.

“I suppose so,” Hal said. “But wherever she went, she must have gone before I could even remember her face.”

CHAPTER 36


* * *

The walk back to Trepassen House took Hal much longer than the outward one. She had refused the offer of a lift from Lizzie, and partly the slowness was because the walk was uphill, and the rain had started making the verges slippery, forcing her to stop and wait for a gap in the traffic every time she passed a deep verge-side puddle, or risk getting drenched by the splash-back.

Partly, though, the plain truth was that she was deliberately walking slowly, trying to sort out the tumble of thoughts before she had to face Harding and his brothers with the truth.

She had to come clean—she had known that, even before Lizzie had spoken the words. She had known it, Hal thought, even before she left for Brighton. She had been running away from the whole situation—from the confession she knew she must make.

She tried to imagine the words.

I lied.

I have been lying to you since I got here.

My mother was not your sister.

She felt sick at the thought—there had been something about the relief with which Harding and Abel had welcomed her back yesterday, almost as if she had been their own sister, come home at last. And now she was going to tear that all away from them again—plunge them back into the decades-long uncertainty they had endured before Hal walked into their lives. How would they react?

Harding would rage and bluster. Abel would shake his head—Hal could almost see the disappointment in his eyes. Ezra? Ezra she didn’t know. He was perhaps the only one of the three she could imagine taking the news with equanimity, maybe even laughing. But then she thought of the barely suppressed rage and grief she had witnessed beneath the surface when he spoke of his sister’s disappearance . . . and suddenly she was not so sure.

Whatever happened, though, however angry they were with Hal herself, Harding at least would be relieved, once the news had sunk in. For Hal’s bequest would fail, and . . . then what? The money would return to the pot, presumably, and would be treated as if their mother had never made a will.

Thank goodness Mitzi wasn’t there—for the thought of confessing in front of Mitzi, who had been so kind . . . Hal almost doubted she could have brought herself to do it.

But Lizzie knew—and with that came a kind of relief, for there was no going back, no way Hal could chicken out now. She had to push through with this, make her apologies, and . . . then what? Go to see Mr. Treswick, she supposed, to explain the whole situation.

But beneath those thoughts were layered other, more disturbing ones. For behind all this lay one simple, immutable fact: Maud was still missing—and no one seemed to know what had happened to her.

Sometime after February 1995 she had slipped out of sight of her mother, brothers, and cousin, and disappeared. Had she gone of her own volition? Or was the truth something else, something more sinister?

Hal thought of her as she walked, of the fiercely intelligent child that both Lizzie and Mr. Treswick remembered with such amused awe. Of the girl in Maggie’s diaries, who had fought with Mrs. Westaway and guarded Maggie’s secrets. And of the woman she had wanted to become—free, educated, independent. Had she made it? Was that the truth—that she had helped her cousin free herself from Trepassen House, and then disappeared in her own turn, to make her life somewhere else? It was possible. But it seemed so unlikely—and so strange, that in all the years, Hal’s mother had never even mentioned her name. However much Maggie had wanted to leave the unhappiness of Trepassen behind her, it seemed unbelievably callous to have erased the existence of a woman who had done so much to help her.